Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teachus to feel and to 'see' the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself. In Dilla Time, Dan Charnas chronicles the life of James DeWitt Yancey, from his gifted Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. He wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. In the same way that J Dilla’s music was a portal for us to hear our world, understand our technology, and feel the pulse of life anew, Charnas has made a portal through which to understand our time—historical time, musical time, and James Yancey’s own time—in a new way.

Here, music is a story of what happens when human and machine times are synthesized into something new. This is the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Since his death from a rare blood disease at the age of 32, Dilla has been celebrated with annual “Dilla Day” festivals across the globe and lauded by journalists from NPR to The New York Times.

He scaled the mountain of Dilla’s complex career and sent back instructions so that others could make the climb. Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialised in symphonies and taught at universities. Dilla's beats, startling some people with their seeming 'sloppiness,' were actually the work of a perfectionist al- most spiritually devoted to his music.

Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and “see” the rhythm of Dilla’s beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla’s music itself. His name wasn't known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at the age of thirty-two he had never had a pop hit. Filled with impeccable reportage, elegant prose, and incandescent anecdotes, Dilla Time is more than an urgently needed biography of hip hop’s most revolutionary producer.

Yet since his death, J Dilla has become a demigod, revered as one of the most important musical figures of the past hundred years, a genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the Twenty First Century. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla's music itself. And he rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of Motown soul to funk, techno, and disco. He wasn’t known to mainstream audiences, and when he died at age thirty-two, he had never had a pop hit. written not simply a biography but, rather, an unconventional, journalistic documentation of musical sounds and their progressions in history and culture.

The cocreator and executive producer of the VH1 movie and TV series The Breaks, he lives in Manhattan and teaches at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Dilla Time is a book that will be read and reread as closely and with as much pleasure as we have listened and relistened to Dilla’s music. Here, music is a story of Black culture in America and of what happens when human and machine times are synthesised into something new.Charnas’ book is also an ethnographic key to the funk-da-fide Detroit family and community which nurtured and skilled Dilla in the science of soulful music production from the cradle to his tragic deathbed– preparing the artist to forge his own Cubistic, canonical and revelatory extension of the architectonic Motown legacy. This is the story of a complicated man and his machines; his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators; and his undeniable legacy. Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century. Based on nearly two hundred original interviews, and filled with graphics that teach us to feel and "see" the rhythm of Dilla's beats, Dilla Time is a book as defining and unique as J Dilla's music itself. This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius' - QUESTLOVEEqual parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century.

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century by pioneering a new musical time-feel, an accomplishment on par with the achievements of Louis Armstrong and James Brown.

An outgrowth of a course on J Dilla he developed at NYU in 2017, the book’s roots go back to Charnas’s time in the record business, when he traveled to Detroit in 1999 to work with the producer then known as Jay Dee. Equal parts biography, musicology and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of James Dewitt Yancey, from his Detroit childhood to his rise as a sought-after hip-hop producer to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the life and legacy of J Dilla, a musical genius who transformed the sound of popular music for the twenty-first century.